Modernism and mystery: the curious case of the Lost Generation - Critical Essay
Carolyn A. Durham
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
"It's great, hey? It's a feast, Paris."
"Yes, I said, "but it's a sort of moveable feast, isn't it? It leaves you with memories so powerful that you can never really forget them. They stay with you forever."
--Satterthwait, Masquerade (242)
In the passages above, Ernest Hemingway's celebrated metaphor for Paris has traveled from the title page of A Moveable Feast to settle into the dialogue of a contemporary detective novel, Masquerade, by Walter Satterthwait. In the course of the trip, moreover, Ernest Hemingway has been transformed into a fictional character whose words serve to prompt the remark now attributed to the novel's female hero. Of course, Hemingway's seminal story of Paris in the 1920s was written years later in America, and immediate and ongoing questions were raised about its accuracy as memoir. Indeed, by the writer's own prefatory admission, A Moveable Feast is, as its title suggests, uneasily contained within traditional generic boundaries: "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." (1)
Similar complexity characterizes Literature Essays the current cultural and literary phenomenon that within the last 15 years has once again led a remarkable number of contemporary American writers to turn their attention to France. A body of work initially dominated by cultural historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and journalists (for example, Richard Bernstein, Robert Daley, Richard Kuisel, Jean-Philippe Mathy) has of late increasingly included the output of essayists (for example, Adam Gopnik, David Sedaris), memoirists (for example, Art Buchwald, Edmund White), and, especially, novelists (for example, Diane Johnson, Claire Messud, Edmund White, Lily King).The contributions of these last mark the emergence of what can be considered a cultural counterpart to a process of globalization that has too frequently been seen as predominantly economic and political in nature. The novels in question also suggest that contemporary American fiction set in France is generally characterized by aspects of postmodern writing (see Durham).
That detective novels and mysteries should constitute a distinctive and substantial subcategory of this corpus is in no way surprising; even Peter Mayle, whose best-selling nonfictional books about Provence have helped to create an audience for contemporary English-language texts about France, has lately turned his attention to light-hearted romantic mysteries. The plotlines and characters of what Carolyn Dever and Margaret Cohen see as the most popular genre of the twentieth century frequently appear in mainstream fiction about France as intertextual allusions (23-24; see, for example, Johnson). Moreover, within postmodern theory, the mystery novel or Literature Essays detective story has come to represent an international and hybrid art form, one that transcends both geographic and generic boundaries (see, for example, Collins and Hutcheon). In an introduction to the work of the French novelist Estelle Monbrun, whose own recent examples of the Franco-American polar (detective novel) traverse national and aesthetic boundaries, Pierre Verdaguer stresses the thematic and stylistic flexibility of the form: "It allows every kind of mixture and can sometimes support the juxtaposition of cultural registers usually deemed incompatible" (356).
Within the "mixture" of recent American detective novels about France--which include Cara Black's new series of murder mysteries set in 1993-94 in different quartiers of Paris and Sarah Smith's trilogy of historical mysteries set in America and France in the first decade of the twentieth century--I want to focus on a group of three texts whose similarities cannot be attributed to the particular vision of a single author. Written in the 1990s and set in consecutive years of the early 1920s, Satterthwait's Masquerade (1998), Howard Engel's Murder in Montparnasse (1999), and Tony Hays's Murder in the Latin Quarter (1993) all feature a cosmopolitan Paris in which an international community of writers and artists frequents the famous literary salons, bookstores, and cafes of the period, where fictional characters interact with fictionalized versions of Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and numerous other legendary figures of the era. (2) These three mysteries confirm Verdaguer's claim that the Literature Essays formal flexibility of the genre encourages the combination of elements conventionally deemed incompatible.
Literary scholars generally concur that the second and third decades of the twentieth century mark both the golden age of the detective novel and the prime of modernism. Scholars assume that the two categories of literature appeal to intellectuals, so that in the 1920s and 1930s an identical group of readers simultaneously consumes the products both of modernism and of mystery. Thus the detective novel may have served as a kind of antidote to the apparent risk of being poisoned by early modernist fiction; according to Marjorie Nicolson, whose 1929 essay "The Professor and the Detective" is virtually contemporaneous with the literary texts that it addresses, the detective novel constitutes a "literature of escape" that offers, contrary to our expectations, "escape not from life, but from literature" (112-13). Such crimes as subjectivity, purposelessness, pessimism, emotionalism, and formlessness, which Nicolson attributes to avant-garde fiction epitomized by James Joyce's Ulysses, are, she argues, avenged by the causal structure, intellectual engagement, purposeful plot and character, and rational order characteristic of the classic detective novel. Holquist similarly finds "the world [as] a threatening, unfamiliar place" not in the detective novel but in modernist fiction:
[I]t was during the same period when the upper reaches of
literature were dramatizing the limits of reason ... that the lower
reaches of literature were dramatizing the power of reason in
such figures Literature Essays as Inspector Poirot.... Is it not natural to assume,
then, that during this period when rationalism is experiencing
some of its most damaging attacks, that intellectuals, who
experienced these attacks first and most deeply, would turn for
relief and easy reassurance to the detective story, the primary
genre of popular literature which they, during the same period,
were, in fact, consuming? The same people who spent their days
with Joyce were reading Agatha Christie at night. (163-64)
To read Joyce in the United States in the 1920s was in essence a criminal act, as Tony Hays reminds us. In Murder in the Latin Quarter, the projected publication of Ulysses in Paris informs a murder investigation in which Joyce himself is the primary suspect until Hem and his good friend Jack Barnett set about solving the crime. In Murder in Montparnasse, Engel's narrator frequents Michaud's until he finally succeeds in spotting Joyce, just as his peaceful family dinner is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of an unruly "redheaded Bohemian" who calls the reigning literary genius of Paris "Jimmy" and whom Mike finally identifies as Ezra Pound (74-76). Although Joyce fails to make an appearance in Masquerade, a copy of Ulysses is prominently displayed in the apartment of the British writer Sybil Norton, who insists on lending Satterthwait's narrator a copy of her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Pyles, featuring a "clever little French detective who runs around Literature Essays and solves crimes" (42). If it remains true today that academics are equally familiar with modernist novels and detective fiction, then the readers of this essay will have understood that in the 1990s even Agatha Christie herself is "spending her days with Joyce." Modernism has been (re)written into the detective novel so that both can now be read not merely successively or even concurrently but literally at one and the same time.
Once again, however, this generic blurring is not so surprising. In a historical overview of the critical study of detective narrative, Heta Pyrhonen argues that
Whereas earlier the detective genre was felt to be totally opposed
to the literature of high modernism, it is now often
aligned with its former opposite: it is said to exhibit many links
with the discourse of modernity and have a place within its canon
as texts that, structurally and thematically, negotiate the same
or similar notions, ideas, tendencies, prejudices, and preferences
as the literature of modernism. (43)
Thus, far from viewing Joyce and Agatha Christie as polar opposites, Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe Birns see the latter as herself "aesthetically modernist" (120). Moreover, by focusing on "Christie's formalism, on what her critics have called her 'formulaic' qualities" (133), Birns and Birns argue that Christie's experiments with narrative voice, generic codes, and self-reflexivity constitute less an "escape from literature" than a foregrounding of its very nature, which also explains the tendency Literature Essays of the mystery novel to attract a readership among intellectuals (see, for example, Sweeney 123).
Similarly, the contemporary detective novels of interest to us here are postmodern without being postmodernist. Holquist argues that the experimental novelists who came after Joyce turned for inspiration from myth to detective fiction precisely because the genre came prepackaged as antimodernist (165). Unlike writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet or Paul Auster, however, who incorporate the conventions of the mystery novel into their fiction in order to undermine not only those very conventions but also, and more importantly, the rational world view they support, Satterthwait, Hays, and Engel allow their readers more traditional pleasures, albeit in unexpected combinations. Their novels both recreate the world in which modernism flourished and fully satisfy the demands of formulaic fiction: in every case there is a murder, a victim, a motive, a detective, a criminal, an investigation, and a resolution. (3) Postmodern irony here does not involve subverting either literature or reality but rather of situating the very writers who famously challenged traditional literary and cultural norms within the most predictable, normative, ordered, and conventional of generic modes.
Moreover, the literary figures in Masquerade, Murder in Montparnasse, and Murder in the Latin Quarter neither make cameo appearances as themselves nor are they simply cast in conventional roles within the plot of the detective fiction. Rather, they appear in a postmodern bricolage that destabilizes identity as well as genre Literature Essays and aesthetic hierarchy. In Masquerade, for example, Gertrude Stein hosts her usual Saturday salon, but the keen eye with which she has amassed the remarkable collection of cubist paintings on display also ferrets out an important clue to the identity of a killer; and her massive bulk does not prevent her from throwing a well-aimed umbrella at his armed accomplice at a timely moment. Even behind the wheel of Godiva, en route to save the life of one Pinkerton agent and accompanied by another, she does not abandon her characteristic interest in educating her traveling companion about "her place in English literature. Basically, there was William Shakespeare, and then there was Miss Stein. She explained to [him] why this was so" (308).
In contrast to Monbrun's literary mysteries, in which the writing of Proust or Colette informs character, plot, or theme, Satterthwait, Hays, and Engel are generally more interested in authors than in their texts. This no doubt corresponds to a revealing Franco-American cultural difference between a reverence for literature and a cult of celebrity. Interestingly, in the early twentieth century the rise of the detective novel was accompanied by the rise of the modern biography, leading Glenn W. Most to surmise that many readers treat detective stories as "installments in the fragmentary biographies of their heroes" (345). Masquerade, Murder in the Latin Quarter, and Murder in Montparnasse clearly invite such a reading, although the recurrent "heroes" Literature Essays whose lives are of interest are now the literary celebrities of the 1920s rather than the novels' actual detectives. Holquist is surely right to insist that postmodernist writers no longer turn to myth for inspiration in the sense that Joyce once did in crafting Ulysses, but a kind of myth nonetheless remains a key component of the modernism of mystery. The major figures of what Stein called a "Lost Generation" (Hemingway, Feast 29), as well as the Left Bank expatriate community in general, had already taken on a mythic quality in their own time, and much of that myth was of their own making.
In this context, A Moveable Feast stands as paradigmatic; its fluid boundaries between "fact" and "fiction," between reality and myth, demarcate the general shape of our knowledge of Paris in the 1920s. So much has been written both by and about the members of the American expatriate community, over such a long period of time and to such different ends, that what emerges might best be conceived in visual terms as a cubist portrait superimposed on an impressionist landscape; it is a decidedly postmodern vision. The recent addition of three mystery novels to this particular corpus takes on special interest. Not only has the analogy between detective and either reader or literary critic, or both, become commonplace within narrative theory (see, for example, Brooks, as well as Porter and Holquist), an important analogy Literature Essays in texts that focus on writers and their works, but also detective fiction foregrounds an act of repetition that is an integral part of both postmodern literature and contemporary cultural globalism. As Porter notes in The Pursuit of Crime, the tendency of mystery writers to "endlessly repeat the vocabulary, tropes, and topoi not only of predecessors writing in the genre but also of the culture as a whole" confirms the general principle that "writing is in an important sense a form of recycling of the previously written" (189). This principle indeed underlies much of modern textual theory and criticism, as Porter aptly observes; appropriately, moreover, it also identifies, once again, the modernist practice by which The Odyssey became Ulysses.
Readers of Masquerade, Murder in the Latin Quarter, and Murder in Montparnasse certainly encounter examples of intertextuality or exact literary reference, such as those reflected in the epigraphs to this essay, as they travel through each of these fictions of Paris. By the conclusion of the third, however, readers are likely to suspect that they have been set adrift in a distinctively postmodern whirlpool of free-floating bits of literary and cultural information recycled from so many texts and contexts that any conventional notion of authorship or authenticity is meaningless. Hemingway's own writing, of course, already proposes multiple and inconsistent versions of Paris in the early 1920s. On the one hand, the fictional characters and events of The Sun Literature Essays Also Rises (1926) are closely modeled on the actual experiences of the novelist and his friends in 1925-26. On the other hand, the purportedly real people and places of the same period described in A Moveable Feast (1964) reflect both willful fabrication and failure of memory (see Tavernier-Courbin). Hemingway's textual practice appears eminently straightforward, however, in comparison to the postmodern methods of Howard Engel, who in 1999 transplants elements of both works to the world of formulaic fiction and popular culture, where Hemingway's adventures in Paris in the fall of 1925 collide with the even more dramatically displaced story of "Jack de Paris," a Parisian version of Jack the Ripper. (4)
More pasticcio than pastiche, Murder in Montparnasse nonetheless begins with parody. The novel itself, whose opening quotation from one Jason Waddington's New Wine closely echoes the tone and content of A Moveable Feast, is preceded by an "editor's note" whose various textual references include, but are in no way limited to, Hemingway's memoir. Adopting the conceit of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, "William Duff Gaspard" claims to reproduce "a portion of the memoirs and fictional writings" (n. pag.) bequeathed to him by his grandfather, who lived in Paris as a young man in the early 1920s. In "an attempt to turn what was simply reportage into a roman a clef," the author of the manuscript in question refers to some characters by their real names (for example, Literature Essays Stein, Joyce, Picasso), makes up seemingly arbitrary names for others (for example, Hemingway = Waddington), and identifies still others by variants of the names they bear in The Sun Also Rises (for example, Lady Biz Leighton = Lady Brett Ashley). What Gaspard calls a "maddening device" is, of course, also a highly vertiginous one, designed to transgress boundaries of literary genre, period, and property. In brief, the detective novelist Howard Engel creates the editor William Duff Gaspard, who presents the fictionalized memoir/autobiographical novel of Mike Ward, who does indeed appear as a friend of Ernest Hemingway's in A Moveable Feast (62-64), but who does not help him capture a mass murderer nor count Duff Gaspard among his descendants. (5)
Even as it performs them, Murder in Montparnasse also questions the codes and conventions of the detective novel. Indeed, in keeping with postmodern practice, Engel repeatedly foregrounds the process of deconstruction. In one particularly evident example of mise en abyme, the narrator meets "Georges Sim ... from Liege" (148); unlike the Belgian writer of mysteries, Georges Simenon, to whom Engel makes ironic reference, Sim earns a living "writing pot-boilers" because he is "too easily confused by puzzles" (149) even to attempt the genre practiced by his near namesake. His friend Anson Tyler similarly attributes his own failure to complete a detective novel to "the form": "They're trash, a truant occupation. There's no room for literary interest. In fact, Literature Essays it's almost breaking the rules to put in anything but the puzzle" (150). In that event, Mike, that is, Engel, who puts "everything but the puzzle" into Murder in Montparnasse, commits the only real crime in a novel in which "literary interest" so quickly and completely crowds out all else that we are surprised by recurrent, if occasional, references to a highly secondary, if not entirely gratuitous, plot of serial murder and its investigation.
Subtitled A Literary Mystery of Paris, Engel's novel is in fact a novel about Ernest Hemingway or, more accurately, two novels about Hemingway, since Wad appears in Murder in Montparnasse both as the Hemingway who is working on his "Spanish novel" and as the Hemingway [Jake Barnes] who is drinking his way through the bars and cafes of "the Quarter" Moreover, Hemingway not only plays a double role, but he also has a textual double in Mike Ward. As author of the text we are reading, Mike is just as guilty as Wad of "trying to make a book out of what went on in Spain this summer" (26). Nor is Mike dependent only on what he learns by his persistent questioning; he is also a regular witness to what Lady Biz Leighton [Lady Brett Ashley (Lady Duff Twysden)] refers to as "encore[s] of one of our Pamplona evenings" (43).
More importantly, Mike is the ironic counterpart of Hemingway, a young journalist who comes Literature Essays to Paris to satisfy his literary ambitions only to learn that he has arrived "five years too late" (100): "I get the feeling--and I've had it more than once--that I've missed the best years in the Quarter. Today we have only the left-overs from a brilliant era, wondering where the parade went" (153). Trapped in "a time when one day and one hangover blended into the next" (57), Mike epitomizes the wasted bohemian life of Stein's "lost generation." But when he does retreat temporarily from the life of "the Quarter" to attempt to write, Mike, even more clearly than Anson Tyler, proves beyond a doubt that he is not Hemingway. (6) Far from achieving the latter's goal of writing "one true sentence," let alone "one true sentence after the other" (141), and still further from being able to follow Stein's advice "to see things in the new way" (253), Mike exhibits a truly painful lack of talent. Since the willingness to put bad writing on display is relatively rare, even in a playful postmodern context, one might be tempted to conclude that Howard Engel, and not Mike Ward, is at fault. Yet the examples are so exaggerated, clash so clearly with the surrounding text, and are so obviously mocked by their own context that I am convinced they are as deliberately crafted on Engel's part as they are presumably unconsciously conceived on Mike's.
To take a single Literature Essays example, once Mike's admiration for no lesser a work than Ulysses reminds him of his desire "to become more than a journalist," he buys notebooks at Joseph Gibert and sets out in search of something to write about. When a seemingly endless hour spent in a cafe on the boulevard St-Michel fails to bring the expected inspiration, Mike tries another of Hemingway's favorite strategies and goes for a walk. Watching children sail boats in the Luxembourg Gardens, Mike is apparently serious when he considers the possibility that he "could write something about them)." Fortunately, if fortuitously, he is saved from a fate somewhat beyond mere banality by an encounter with an angry white poodle named Basket and a similarly uncivil "thin, tiny woman with an olive complexion" and "dark, rather Spanish eyes": "Maybe I could write something about them, too, I thought" (64-66). The desire to write about Alice B. Toklas, even in the absence of her companion, is hardly an original idea either; indeed, even Mike seems to foresee rival texts of the future as he rereads his own:
It was very depressing, a description of my encounter in the
Luxembourg with the swarthy lady and her poodle. Had I been
successful in describing her fussy, correct manner, her studied
insolence at my rebuke of her dog? Maybe it required a greater
subtlety than I could manage. (86) (7)
In the introduction to Paris in American Literature Essays Literature, Jean Meral makes the surprising assertion that Paris as a literary motif is of relatively little importance in American writing; and at the end of what is nevertheless a comprehensive and detailed discussion of the subject, informed by some 200 works of fiction, he concludes that the subject, in steady decline since 1940, has probably been exhausted:
Paris has become a neutral territory where writers can no longer
find very fertile soil. It has become a mere literary cliche. Will
the capital ever inspire other major works of American literature?
All signs point to the end of its role as a creative catalyst for
successive generations of writers. It does not seem to offer a
challenge any more, eliciting new and flesh responses from authors
and shaping the destinies of their heroes. (244)
Meral reached this conclusion at precisely the point in time when the metamorphic powers of the "moveable feast" had already begun to inspire a new generation of writers who significantly increased the number of twentieth-century American novels set in Paris. Arguably, Meral failed to anticipate the postmodern future of global popular culture, thereby missing something significant about American literary culture as well. Meral, who is French, based his study on the assumption that the Paris of American literature has "no mythical value of its own" and can only be read as "the echo of another nation's myth, apprehended through a foreign sensibility" (2). Literature Essays But what he therefore dismissed in its final incarnation as "mere literary cliche" constitutes the very generative material that produced "new and fresh responses" within the context of postmodernism, claimed by Frederic Jameson as "the first specifically North American global style" (qtd. in Bradbury 471n10).
In the "neutral territory" of the Paris settings of Satterthwait's, Hays's, and Engel's novels, the city is indeed openly cliched. Masquerade, for example, provides the most detailed and comprehensive visit of the three, but in it Paris is nonetheless playfully reduced to its most famous signifier, whose apparently identical reproductions circulate throughout France and the novel. The same "charming (if not terribly accomplished) print of the Eiffel Tower," which enchants the exuberant Jane Turner as she looks up from "[her] French bed, in [her] French hotel room, in [her] French town, in [her] French France" on the first night of her very first trip to France (4), similarly orients Phil Beaumont, her considerably more worldly and better-traveled Pinkerton colleague: "Except for a print above the bed, a painting of the Eiffel Tower, it could have been a room in any decent hotel in Pittsburgh or Portland or Peoria" (16). By the time Beaumont finally gets to examine the scene of the murder, the reappearance of the image in question, now "a familiar-looking framed print of the Eiffel Tower" (41), has become thoroughly predictable. Masquerade's use of the Eiffel Tower to signify Paris Literature Essays confirms Porter's contention that the "mythic landscapes" of the detective novel habitually rely on the very same cultural references commonly encountered in tourist brochures (217-18). Interestingly, Martine Guyot-Bender has recently noted that the magazine distributed to travelers by United Airlines accompanies its inevitable photographs of the Eiffel Tower with far less expected references to the idealized Paris of the "Lost Generation," complete with several quotations from Gertrude Stein (142-51). Guyot-Bender's assumption that the magazine highlights this period as the "most illustrious for many Americans" (147) corresponds to Meral's view that "the Parisian theme in American literature is most richly orchestrated" in the 1920s (244).
But if such evidence of readers' interest in the American expatriate community of the 1920s helps explain why the "Lost Generation" figures in so many contemporary novels set in France, another aspect of American literary history helps us understand why so much of that fiction should consist of detective novels. With "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," first published in 1841, Edgar Allan Poe invented detective fiction as a literary genre. (8) This tale and its two sequels, "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter," are all set in Paris and feature a Frenchman, C. Auguste Dupin, whose adventures are narrated by an unnamed American friend. Dupin's ability to resolve the most puzzling of crimes by the methodical application of his superior powers of reason provides yet another explanation for the Literature Essays consistent positing of intellectuals as a primary audience of detective fiction. Poe's association with France subsequently becomes so strong that Jacques Cabau introduces a critical study of the author by reminding his French audience that "Edgar Poe est un ecrivain americain" (qtd. in Verdaguer, Seduction 294n8). But not only wasn't Poe French, he never even visited France.
The trope of "mysterious Paris," with whose invention Meral also credits Poe, is thus entirely imaginary--or, rather, already literary--from the time of its inception. Poe travels to Paris, as do most other American readers of popular fiction in the nineteenth century, by turning the pages of novels by Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, and, after 1842, Eugene Sue (see Meral 4-6). The analogy with the detective fiction of Engels, Hays, and Satterthwait, whose readers reach the same geographical destination through the literature of modernism, is clear. Similarly, Poe's short stories can be said to include among their many other innovations early examples of such strategies of postmodern mystery as multilayered intertextuality, cross-cultural germination, and the conflation of "original" works and their subsequent "translations," both textual and geographical. One of the most recent manifestations of the importance of Poe's stories to both the history of the detective novel and the establishment of Paris as its privileged location took place in a suitably literary setting. During the late fall and winter of 2000-01, the Bibliotheque des Litteratures Policieres (BILIPO), a library in Literature Essays the Latin Quarter that houses a special collection of novels and reference works devoted to detective literature and criminology, organized an exhibition on "Les Crimes de Paris, lieux et non-lieux du crime a Paris au XIXe siecle," along whose "parcours litteraire" manuscripts and illustrations of Poe's short stories figured prominently (Kalifa 3). In a pertinent example of literary repetition, Dupin and his friend first meet in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" in an "obscure library" (658) and pass much of their time subsequently in the "little back library or book closet" in which Dupin essentially lives ("The Purloined Letter" 917).
If Poe's choice of Paris results in part from the city's reputation as a site of crime, and his particular vision of Paris reflects his reading habits, the connotations of the city also no doubt play a role in the creation of the character of Dupin. The capital of the nation forever associated with universal reason after the French Enlightenment would seem to be the logical place for Poe's supremely adept promoter and practitioner of ratiocination. In the first half of the nineteenth century, moreover, the importance of romanticism in France also explains the singular appeal that Poe's poetry and macabre tales held for Charles Baudelaire, among others. Even in his detective fiction, Poe creates a hero who is as much a proponent of poetry as he is of abstract logic (see, for example, "The Purloined Letter" Literature Essays 927). This early appearance in detective fiction of the amateur detective as at once artist, aesthete, and problem solver, whose methods are both confined by reason and inspired by imagination, brings us back, of course, to the increasingly less curious conjunction of modernism and mystery.
Poe is credited, in particular, with establishing the hard-boiled version of the detective novel, the American counterpart to the British whodunit (Porter 128). Despite the predictable presence of some elements of the latter in Masquerade, Murder in Montparnasse, and Murder in the Latin Quarter, the importance of professional detectives and sensational crimes places all three novels prominently within Poe's lineage. Moreover, among a wider range of literary descendants of Poe and the American hardboiled narrative, the work of Hemingway is among the most frequently cited (see, for example, Pyrhonen 59-60, Tani xiv). The influence of Poe's detective fiction is most directly evident in Masquerade, even though the single explicit reference within Satterthwait's novel adverts only to the writer's horror tales (121) and despite the fact that Poe inevitably enters postmodern mystery in impure form, his texts overlaid and revised by those of his many successors. The crime under investigation in Masquerade is a variation on the locked-room mystery, whose earliest ancestor is "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and the American Phil Beaumont teams up with the French Henri Ledoq to solve a murder that makes evident the parallelism between detective and Literature Essays criminal essential to the resolution of the crime in "The Purloined Letter." Still, although Ledoq is both amateur detective and aesthete, independently wealthy, and closely connected to some of the most prominent artistic and political figures of Paris, his portrait ultimately owes less to Poe's Dupin than to Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. (9) (Anything else would be surprising in a novel that features, as noted earlier, a barely disguised Christie among its cast of characters.) In contrast, Beaumont, who narrates Masquerade in the first person, nonetheless bears no further resemblance either to Dupin's American companion or to such British descendants as Christie's Hastings (The Mysterious Affair at Styles) or Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson. Indeed, although Ledoq, disguised as Sherlock Holmes, suggests that Phil might like to accompany him to the masquerade ball in the guise of Watson (263), traditional roles are, if anything, reversed, as Ledoq alternately puzzles and marvels over Beaumont's mind, manners, language, and behavior. (10)
The interplay between Ledoq and Beaumont sets Masquerade apart from Murder in Montparnasse and Murder in the Latin Quarter, whose almost exclusive focus on the American expatriate community in Paris reflects the similar insularity evident in the texts written both by and about modernist writers in the early twentieth century: "one of the most common misconceptions about American literature is to imagine that Paris is a major theme for the writers of the Lost Generation" (Meral 137). In Satterthwait's Literature Essays novel, by contrast, cross-cultural comparison becomes a source both of insight and of comedy as Ledoq continually revises his assessment of Beaumont's claim to French ancestry. Porter argues that just such an embodiment of cultural stereotypes constitutes part of the ongoing appeal of detective fiction:
The evidence suggests that the international audience which
continues to read detective fiction still enjoys its Englishmen
upper class and urbane, its Americans lean and tough, and its
Frenchmen skeptical, tolerant, and worldly-wise. Such cultural
stereotypes seem to confirm that the world may be known once
and for all; in the face of apparent change, Englishness,
Americanness, and Frenchness go on forever. The attraction of
popular literature resides not least in the authority with
which it offers the certainties of myth for the confusions of
history. (217)
In the case of Masquerade, on the one hand, Henri is dismayed by Phil's notable lack of appreciation for the essential components of Frenchness: cuisine (Phil refuses to eat "organ meats" [48] and insists on steak "cooked all by itself. No cream sauce. No wine sauce" [185]; Henri, on a car chase, rehearses his recipe for soupe a l'oignon [148-50] and shares recipes for coq au vin with a police inspector at the scene of a double murder [169-70]); couture (Phil arrives in Paris with a single small suitcase; Henri needs three large ones to go into hiding for two days); and culture (Phil suspects Literature Essays Henri's good friend Gertrude Stein of excessive drinking when she informs him that "Rose is a rose is a rose" [218]). On the other hand, Henri is delighted to have his belief in Americans as "invariably straightforward and open" countered by Phil's penchant for irony and duplicity (see, for example, 8, 24) and relieved to see Phil rapidly abandon "that famous American sense of fair play" when their lives are at risk (133).
In terms of location as well, Masquerade has far greater geographical reach than its two companion mysteries, whose characters never leave the Left Bank unless they have the misfortune to be kidnapped. Satterthwait's two Pinkerton agents take us on a charming whirlwind tour of Paris, which includes visits to all three of the literary versions of the city identified by Meral. In Poe's "mysterious Paris," Phil and Henri are chased by car through the narrow streets around Les Halles and escape on foot through the sewers; someone shoots at Jane in the catacombs, for Meral "the most striking architectural feature of the mysterious city" and one "admirably suited to the twists and turns of the detective novel" (10-11). In "Bohemian Paris," Jane is propositioned in the afternoon by the very seductive Virginia Randall [Nathalie Barney] in the marble temple of her garden on rue Jacob and in the evening by a very boorish Ernest Hemingway in Gertrude Stein's kitchen on rue de Fleurus. Despite Literature Essays Phil's lament--"It would be a good city to investigate, I decided, if I weren't already investigating a murder" (162)--there are even excursions into "Tourist Paris." Jane shops in Coco Chanel's boutique and Phil races through "Bon Marche" in an attempt to shake pursuers as Henri delivers the history of the department store, complete with appropriate literary references to Zola's Au bonheur des dames.
Rob Kroes observes about critiques of contemporary popular culture:
What is often held against the emerging international mass, or
pop, culture is precisely its international, if not cosmopolitan,
character. Clearly this is a case of double standards. At the level
of high culture, most clearly in its modernist phase, there has
always been this dream of transcending the local, the provincial,
and the national, or in social terms, to transgress the narrow
bounds of the bourgeois world and to enter a realm that is nothing
if not international: the transcendence lay in being truly
"European" or "cosmopolitan" (126)
The conjunction of modernism and mystery in recent American detective novels pursues this dream. By revisiting the 1920s through the framework of the 1990s, by both remembering and reinventing the myth of Paris as "a moveable feast," by recreating the expatriate literary community of the turn of one century for the globally literate readers of the beginning of another, Satterthwait, Hays, and Engel, among many other contemporary American cosmopolitan novelists, confirm the many intersections of modernism with Literature Essays postmodernity and of France with the United States--including, most importantly, a shared commitment to the international and to the experimental:
Miss Stein, it seemed, had been right all along: the two countries
that instinctively shared in common a love of the modern and a
gift for creating it were America and France. (Bradbury 305) (11)
Notes
(1.) A Moveable Feast documents Hemingway's Paris experience during the years 1922-26. Written in Cuba and Idaho between 1957 and 1960, it was published posthumously in 1964.
(2.) Sam McCarver's The Case of the Uninvited Guest (2002) suggests that the trend will continue into the twenty-first century. Set in the final weeks of 1918, McCarver's novel features Hemingway as a wounded war hero and a novice journalist whose decision to vacation in Paris on his way home to America allows him to help solve a murder.
(3.) Satterthwait, Engel, and Hays have an interesting predecessor in Elliot Paul, who wrote a series of detective novels in the late 1930s set in Montparnasse. Although Jean Meral describes his work in terms that certainly apply to that of his successors--"Paul makes capital out of the Lost Generation ... and freely mixes popular detective archetypes with asides to the initiated" (210)--the writers of the period appear only as background to Paul's hero, Homer Evans, himself an American expatriate artist as well as an amateur detective.
(4.) Yet, as is frequently the case in these novels, something that seems Literature Essays innovative at first sight turns out to have a possible origin in a place at once predictable and unexpected. In A Moveable Feast, Stein lends Hemingway what he calls "that marvelous story of Jack the Ripper"; and he cites the mysteries of Simenon as his favorite "after-work books" (27). In what could be an allusion to Poe's Dupin as well as a foreshadowing of Murder in Montparnasse, Hemingway also reports on the special pleasures of cafe reading in Paris: "There are always some splendid crimes in the newspapers that you follow from day to day, when you live in France. These crimes read like continued stories" (167).
(5.) Satterthwait's Masquerade is an epistolary novel in which the letters sent by Jane Turner to a friend in England alternate with Phil Beaumont's first-person account. Satterthwait uses the device to similarly self-referential ends, although in this case his diegetic persona, unlike Engel's, reveals herself to be highly conscious of the proper construction of a mystery story. Jane's letters are constructed throughout to create suspense; even at the end of the novel she refuses to reveal the identity of the murderer to her correspondent: "I know that you are the sort of person who, whenever she picks up a crime novel, immediately opens it at the last page, to determine the identity of the killer" (322).
(6.) Tyler's envy, which leads to the theft of the manuscripts that Waddington believes to Literature Essays have been lost, appears to be based on a confusion between Hemingway the writer and Jake Barnes the bohemian:
[H]e was so jealous of your apparent ease with words that he had to
try to destroy your work.... He doesn't know the blood it's cost
you; he only sees the sentences one after another put down with
precision and simplicity.... To him, with your talent for
friendship, your sloppy manner around the Quarter--maybe he thought
you were unworthy of your genius. (288-89)
(7.) A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises also provide an intertextual context for Satterthwait and Hays. The suicidal murder victim in Masquerade is once again a figure out of Hemingway's fiction. According to some, Dickie, an ambulance driver in WorldWar I, never recovered from the war and was busily drinking his way to oblivion, notably with the Fitzgeralds (38-39), at the time of his death. Others, however, attribute his despair to the fact that he, like Engel's Tyler, lacked the one thing that mattered most in Paris in the 1920s: "[H]e had everything he wanted. Except talent.... He wanted desperately to be an artist. He tried poetry, he tried painting. He failed at both" (203-04).
Although Murder in the Latin Quarter is more successful as a murder mystery than Murder in Montparnasse, Hays's novel also tells the parallel story of what happened to Hemingway's friend Jack Barnett in the war and of how Hemingway Literature Essays came to turn this story into that of Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. As one illustration of a common practice, note also the following passages, taken respectively from A Moveable Feast and Murder in the Latin Quarter:
I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my
shoulder and wrote in the notebook.... The story was about
coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war
in it. (76)
Hem pulled out a pad and pencil and started scribbling.... It's
about the war, but, I don't want to mention the war in it. (141)
(8.) A certain number of critics and theorists, of course, prefer what Porter calls "the long view" of the subject and trace the origins of detective fiction back to Greek tragedy (11).
(9.) The only overt reference to Poe's detective stories in these three novels occurs in Murder in the Latin Quarter in the following brief exchange between Jack Barnett and Hemingway (12):
--You need Auguste Dupin.
--Leave Poe out of this.
In Hays's novel, Police Inspector Duvall, with whom Jack has already worked on a previous case, is another variation on Dupin by way of Hercule Poirot.
(10.) Beaumont himself clearly prefers the role of Poirot to that of Hastings. After flipping through a copy of Sybil Norton's The Mysterious Affair at Pyles about "the famous French private detective Pierre Reynard" and "his buddy, Kippers, the Literature Essays narrator, [who] follows him around and admires his technique" (104), Phil on occasion pointedly compares his own behavior to that of Reynard (for example, 130). Christie's Poirot is, of course, Belgian.
(11.) In this sense as well, Masquerade, Murder in the Latin Quarter, and Murder in Montparnasse are representative of the larger body of contemporary American novels set in Paris, which include mainstream as well as mystery novels. For example, the characters in Smith's The Knowledge of Water, who include Milly Xico [Colette] as the heroine's closest friend, attend Stein's salon in 1910. Margaret Vandenburg's An American in Paris is no doubt subtitled "a novel" to distinguish her book from Janet Flanner's. Like Flanner, who is a character in Vandenburg's novel, the heroine of this American in Paris is a journalist who covers the avant-garde scene from Paris; this time Stein appears as criminal rather than detective, the co-conspirator with Picasso and Juan Gris in an art forgery. Matthew Stadler's Allan Stein is set in the present, but the story of Stein's nephew and a portrait painted of him by Picasso play a key role in the narrative. In Charlotte Carter's Coq au vin and Shay Youngblood's Black Girl in Paris, historical fascination with the black American expatriate community of musicians and writers of the 1940s prompts their contemporary heroines to travel to Paris.
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